Scars
by Mild Guy
Summary: A confession, a lesson, a change, and a homecoming. A collection of four vignettes staring Brawl characters.
1. Plan A

Disclaimer: The stories within this collection contain characters and concepts that are not the property of the author. They are the intellectual property of Nintendo, Konami, Sega, and their associates. This work of fanfiction is not endorsed by the original creators and is not in any way meant to insult the original work. The author has received no monetary benefit from this posting.

Beta read by Herr Wozzeck.

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**Plan A**

Wolf cracked first.

"You won, okay? Just let us go. We didn't come here to hurt anyone. It was just fun and games. C'mon, you're one of us. A—"

"Killer?" Solid Snake double checked his work and decided to lash one last belt of C4 around his three targets. Hard experience had shown him it was better to err on the side of overkill in such situations.

Bowser snarled his words to hide the fear behind them. "You've proved your point. Now untie us and let's sort this out. We can give you money, weapons. Women! …Men?"

Snake said nothing.

"His masters have already recompensed him adequately, it would seem," said Ganondorf. A necklace of fragmentation grenades and duct tape hung around his neck. The metal shells clacked as he twisted his head around to leer at Snake. Ganondorf expected to survive this, and that assumption made him more haughty than usual. Snake hoped to disappoint him. Unknown to the sorcerer, each grenade in that grisly collar contained shavings from the Master Sword. "He will kill us in one deft stroke. How I envy him."

"But why do it?" asked Wolf. "Tell us who put you up to this. Bowser's right, we can pay you more."

"Not doing this for money," Snake said.

Wolf's eyes widened to their white rims. "The other competitors sold you their sob stories and made us out as the villains, didn't they? At least listen to our side of things. Everyone here has their own agenda. You'll come to find out we're simply misunderstood."

Snake shrugged, finally sick of it. "No one put me up to this. I saw it in their eyes. Heard it in the words they weren't saying. Slowly, I learned what they fear, and why. Your victims live each day looking over their shoulder, watching the shadows. Mario, Link, and the others grow old wondering which of their loved ones you'll take next. I decided to end the vicious cycles on my own. Now their kingdoms will be safe, their hands will remain clean of your blood. I'll do what they cannot—what I've failed to do for my own world. It's the only reason I became your friend."

Snake retreated behind the sandbag pile, traced the detonator's trigger with his thumb. "Here goes plan A."


	2. Devoured

Beta read by: Byoshi, Herr Wozzeck, and Babycharmander.

Any mistakes and sloppy writing are the sole fault of the writer and not the beta readers.

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**Devoured**

Ike reeled from the dark dining room. His hands clawed over his ears, eyes squeezed closed. He could not shut out the images, the _sounds_ skirling through his skull like shrieking bats, each one more horrible than the last. Deep inside, he knew they would live on as part of him forever.

The rooms and hallways seemed to press in and enclose him like living organs. The air was thin, suffocating. He had to escape. Maybe outside he could breathe. Maybe he could keep running. But how did one outrun memories?

Vulgar laughter rose from the shadowed corridor behind him. Ike doubled over, retching. He straightened to find others nearby, watching. Did they know? And if they knew, then were they not insane? Yes. How else could they display such calm when quartered with alien horrors—tenets alongside depraved lunacy?

"Stop staring at me! I'm not the one who is mad!" he shrieked and hurtled down the stairs.

The others opened their mouths in shock or laughter. Perhaps it was he who laughed—great bubbling peals of psychotic mirth. He could no longer tell. The sight of their unhinged faces wracked him with new nausea. He did not stop running until the cool night's air enveloped his fevered body. The front lawn stretched away empty in the silver moonlight. Out here, nature ruled and things were sane.

Away from the aura of lighted windows he coughed into the dirt and wiped the foamed slaver from his lips. He began to pull together his scattered mind one fraction at a time. Partway through this hopeless process he made the mistake of looking up. The sky stretched out and over the earth like the lipless maw of a mad god, the stars glistening on its black teeth merely pieces of unswallowed food. If only it would consume this world as well and be done with it.

Footsteps on the soft grass. It was Fox McCloud, the laguz who piloted metal birds through the heavens. He and Falco and the shrill toad had been busy maintaining one such aerocraft. It was parked outside the garage and strewn with electric lanterns, close to where Ike had slumped onto the lawn. Now Fox's companions stared as their leader approached. Fox motioned them back to work. The other laguz made a pretense of working while they continued to eavesdrop.

"You look like you've just witnessed hell having a picnic. What's crawled up your exhaust port and died?" asked Fox. The laguz was a mercenary, like himself. Perhaps that flimsy bond between them would be enough, here in this strange land so far from friends and family.

A coherent explanation fled the mercenary captain the instant he made the effort to formulate a response. He struggled to get something out, anything at all. "I have gazed into the abyss. And it has gazed back into me!" It was all he could manage.

Fox plopped down on the ground next to Ike and laid a chummy arm over his shoulders. He cast one last warning glance at his comrades, and said, "Calm down, calm down. It can't be all bad. Tell me everything that's happened."

"I…I was challenged to an eating contest by Wario. A prideful fool, I accepted."

Fox chuckled. "I think I know what comes next. Go on, then."

Ike wiped the fresh foam from his lips and swallowed hard. "Wario tricked me, a snare of words half-hidden in our original agreement. In his stead, he set a freak at the table before me. His champion." A terrible trembling overtook Ike then. The mercenary captain fell silent. Some greater part of him was unable, or unwilling to continue. It was easier, he found, to stare at the sheered grass of the front yard and let the memories go elsewhere.

Fox gave him a hard slap across the face. His unsettlingly human eyes bored into Ike's. "Stay with me, damnit!"

Ike twitched and sputtered. The words spilled out in a tumbling rush. "Oh goddess! Its eyes! It had the eyes of a child! The demon's mouth yawned impossibly wide. It began to eat. I could not look away. From that dark cavity whispered voices in a language I could not understand. I think they were commanding me to join them.

"And the food it consumed—even now I realize my mind could not fully process what I was seeing. I'm left with only impressions. Glimpsed edges of a far greater reality! Whatever crossed that thing's lips slipped and twined around dimensions unknown to our mortal plane. Food mulched and formed into shapes that cannot—should not exist! The crunching and slurping! Even now the noises eat away my mind from within. Everything it devoured transformed into—" Ike pointed to the cold stars above. And then he fell to his face, exhausted, quivering in loathing and horror.

Fox's furry hand patted his back. "There, there soldier. I'll go get Ness and we'll remove those nasty memories for good. It's a lesson hard learned, and we've all had to learn it sooner or later. Never, ever watch Kirby eat."


	3. Horizon

Beta read by: Herr Wozzeck, and Babycharmander.

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**Horizon**

My name is Meta Knight. I was once a Smash Brother.

It happened on the third day of the third Smash battle royal. The arena was a hovering shelf of rock we simply named the Battlefield. Many hundreds of strides below the arena a pristine mountain wilderness gave way to a bay of calm blue waters. Was any of it real? I will never know.

This was my first match of the tournament—a team battle: my red team against the hero Link and Princess Zelda for the green.

A hole opened in the world. Through the unholy portal he thundered into our midst on the back of a black charger. He was neither late nor early for his match, but exactly on time. Alone on the Battlefield he stood tall, arms crossed, like a statue of an emperor of old come alive. A vision of death's construction. My soul shook to gaze upon him.

My gladiatorial partner…Ganondorf.

No signal we exchanged, no words or gestures. The sorcerer watched our opponents as they watched him. I tore my eyes away in an effort to do the same.

We received the signal to begin. Ganondorf chuckled and beat his open palm with a gauntleted fist.

My cape formed wings and beat the air. Quickly I gained the advantage of height. I no longer spared my partner any attention. My target was in sight. From above I sized up my foe, Link. Though he was no knight, all the same I was eager to test my swordsmanship against this living legend—the salvation of his kingdom was said to rely entirely on his sword arm and the peerless weapon it gripped, the Master Sword.

Link, though young, displayed an unhurried economy of movement common in experienced warriors. He did not go for his bow or throwing club as I expected, but instead unsheathed that blade of legend and rushed forward.

The wings of my cape straightened out behind me, and I dived with a raptor's grace upon my prey. The morning sunlight transformed my blade into molten gold, its barbs cruel and sharp as dragon's teeth. I braced for the lick of steel on steel, the sweet tension that would fill me when I pressed my blade against his. Alas, it was not to be.

So keen on my prey, I did not mark the Princess Zelda until she was standing before me. A blue aura encased her for an instant. The light deflected my blade, as if I had attempted to hew a wall of sheer granite. Link sprinted past us to engage Ganondorf. I realized then our opponents had planned thus: The paragon should topple the tyrant once more while the princess and her parlor tricks distracted the one they deemed the lesser threat.

My indignation knew no limits. I tore into Zelda with a ferocity I might have, in a calmer state of mind, deemed unbecoming of a knight towards a member of the fairer sex. I was a cyclone. A relentless drill boring into the smooth cheek of her defenses. Her magic bolts never came close to touching me in my fury. At the last, she attempted a transformation into the lithe Sheika form that served her so well against fleeter opponents. Before she emerged fully from her chrysalis of fairy light I threw my cape over her and delivered the final cut.

I shunted her limp form over Battlefield's edge and scored my team one point.

With contempt still seething in my heart, I turned to find Link dangling above the ground, boots kicking uselessly in the charged air. Ganondorf's great fist crushed closed over the Hylian's delicate skull. Dark energies roiled from between those fingers. The veins on Link's neck ran a poisoned purple. The air reeked of corruption.

Ganondorf whispered to the Hylian. "Do you hear the winds of change howling, boy? It is the savage gust that once swept desolation and death over the land of my birth. Here, that same wind heralds my victory. There are no prophecies left to save you in this place. Compared to the reign that is to come, the era of you and your ilk's triumph is but the lifespan of an insect. Only I remain. The eternal cycle is now broken. The wind claims you."

A furious gale consumed the Battlefield. Bitter cold, it filled me with inexplicable dread.

Ganondorf tossed Link unconscious into the rushing wind, where he was blown clear from Battlefield to plummet helplessly into the yawning chasm of empty air. Though I know it to be impossible, before I was able draw my cape over my mask I felt the agony of sand blowing into my eyes.

The battlefield grew silent at once. The wind had vanished. My eyes were clear. The match was ours.

Link and Zelda were never the same. Broken things, they moved through an uncaring world, silent, numb. The Hylians fought no more matches and left for Hyrule soon after.

I called on Ganondorf in his state room that night. He reclined naked on a pile of silk cushions, plucking grapes from a vine and dropping them into his red mouth. The hard magnificence of his body, greenish bronze skin striped and puckered with ancient scars, stole away my breath.

I asked him if I could learn to hear the winds of death and destiny, as he did. Like skin withdrawing from a knife cut, Ganondorf's smile split wide open.


	4. Empty Nest Syndrome

Beta-read by: Byoshi.

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**Empty Nest Syndrome**

"I don't understand."

Shadows framed Amy's pale and worry drawn face. A sliver of moon reflected in her wide eyes. She had caught him there, at the boundary. How long and desperately had she ran for this one last chance at goodbye? Amy didn't appear winded. He realized he had been standing there for some time, gathering the nerve to step over.

"There's nothing to understand. I can't take it, staying in one place forever."

"That's not true. This is your home."

In the dim bluish light Sonic saw her a little better now: hands behind her back; the toe of one running shoe restlessly poking the ground. She looked so forlorn that a mad urge took hold of him—more than anything he needed to gather her up in his arms and rush back to a quiet place where familiarity could settle over and warm them like an old blanket.

A shiver of terror rattled his spines. Suddenly weak, he almost gave in. Sonic looked past her to the great shapeless mass of the distant nighttime landscape—a land formed not from stone and mud, but from slumbering nightmares. And amidst that slumber, visions stirred to life as he watched, taking on structure, texture, color. The world, as it was and would be, scrolled before his eyes. Upon the shores of every shining bay, replacing every forest and climbing every mountainside, the urban growth of man crept forth.

Pardoned and sanctioned, Robotnik lead them. For his ceaseless subversion of life awards heaped upon the ground his boots trampled. It was no longer water that gurgled through the forest streams. Trees fell by the hundreds to make way for twisted constructs of metal and wires. He converted woodland creatures to cyborg sentries. Hills he hollowed out became dens for clanking monstrosities.

Each day, the lights dimmed a little more in the eyes of his friends. Their faces slackened and their words crumbled into bestial grunts. Already, the humans were eager to fill the special zoos they had prepared.

Nature everywhere converted into joyless parody.

"This isn't home anymore." Sonic turned away so that Amy could not see his face. "If you care, nothing's stopping you from crossing over too. I'll be waiting."

Before he could falter, he ran. He felt nothing crossing the horizon.

The sun's warmth washed clean his night-chilled face. One more step forward placed him in the shade of a mushroom taller and mightier than any cybertree of Robotnik's. In the distance a pink castle presided over regal gardens and a glittering pond.

Nearby, a humble cottage's front door swung open. Out stepped a human, short by their standards, with a great domed belly and the burly arms of a hard laborer. The tanned skin around his eyes crinkled in joyful recognition.

"You came."

Sonic fell into those strong arms and hugged back with all his might, unabashed tears glossing his cheeks. "It's all screwed up. I couldn't save anyone. I'm sorry—"

Mario gave Sonic's blue spiny back a kindly, if cautious, slap. "All's forgiven. Welcome home, son."


End file.
